#005 - How to grow a successful business without hustling

Host Samantha Noelle explains that building a business is a marathon and exhaustion isn’t proof your business is healthy. She breaks down the addiction to hustle, why working harder eventually stops working (bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and you becoming the bottleneck), and how your results reflect your systems and boundaries. 

Using Sara Blakely’s slow, focused growth of Spanx and Arianna Huffington’s burnout as examples, she urges women not to equate chaos with success or copy male hustle influencers. She ties hustle to nervous system dysregulation, guilt around slowing down, and adrenaline addiction, and emphasizes that calm, strategic growth is possible. 

Practical steps include simplifying offers, delegating and automating repetitive work, streamlining tools, setting boundaries, prioritizing high-yield actions, tracking ROI, and focusing on profitability—not just sales—so the business supports your life instead of consuming it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. And building is the operative word here. The most solid structures that stand the test of time are built. They are not made and they are definitely not slobbed together by a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. Exhaustion is not proof that your business is healthy. Hey everyone, I'm your host, Samantha Noel, and you are listening to the Overcome Her podcast, episode number five, where I'm gonna talk all about stop hustling so hard. Your business will still grow. I promise. And I'm gonna give this podcast to you in five different sections, okay? So first we're gonna talk about the addiction to hustling, and then we are going to talk about why working harder stops working. Seems counterintuitive, but it happens. Then we're gonna talk about your business reflects the systems that you have in place, and then we're gonna talk about your nervous system and chaos because I am really focused on talking about your nervous system and how it shapes the success of your business. And then finally, we will get to section five, which is always where I give you the how-to's and the things that you can actually implement to improve. So let's get started. I am a high achieving female, self-proclaimed, and I think it's pretty evident because a lot of people have just naturally said that I am a high achiever. Some people love it, some people hate it, some women are threatened by it, some men are threatened by it, some men love it, some women love it. It is what it is, and I'm guessing that you, if you're listening to this, you're probably also a high achiever as well. Even if you don't think you are, you probably are. If you're drawn to being a business owner, you're a high achiever. Because it and not to say that women in the corporate world are not high achievers, because they are there are definitely many high achieving females who are in the corporate world, absolutely. But if you have the ladyballs to start a business and stick with it, you are definitely a high achiever because there is a lot that goes into it. You have to wear many, many hats, and a lot of us think that we have to hustle and grind harder. In fact, I used to have a male friend, he was one of my best friends for many years, and he was all about the hustle. And if you listen to a lot of these male entrepreneurs and you listen to their podcasts and you watch their Instagram videos, a lot of them really do advocate for hustle. But here's the thing, ladies. If your business is only successful if you're hustling to the point of burnout and exhaustion, then what happens when you stop or you slow down? Because inevitably you will. Life gets in the way. Maybe you have a family, maybe you have kids, maybe somebody gets sick, maybe a parent or a sibling passes away. You never know what life will throw at you because you are not in control of life, and there is only so much that is within you that can go before you burn out. You know, even the brightest stars burn out eventually. So what happens? What happens then? The addiction to hustle. I get it. Truly, I get it. Being a business owner who runs a successful business or multiple successful businesses means that you're operating differently than the rest of the world. You're not going to work from nine to five or even from nine to seven to collect a paycheck every two weeks. And if your business doesn't succeed, then who feeds, houses, and clothes you and your family? I get that part. But at what point do we as female entrepreneurs realize that sometimes we've associated busyness with being important, needed, and valued? And really, how helpful is that busyness to the growth and the success of our business? And I'm going to challenge you that if your immediate mental thought is, well, my business wouldn't grow if I wasn't that busy, I'm going to challenge you that that's simply a belief. And there's somebody else who believes that businesses can be built strategically over long periods of time and be insanely successful, and they prove themselves right. We can always prove ourselves right based on whatever beliefs we think because we will take the actions based off of whatever we believe to be true. So it's not that your belief is wrong, but there is another way. And it depends what's important to you. Do you value burning yourself out? Do you value limiting the very resources that you have as a human being, as a female, as a mother, as a sister, as a friend? Do you value burning those things out just for a business? Think about that. A lot of women also have an emotional attachment to struggle. And I've known women over the years who, whenever I asked how they were doing, they always led with, I'm so busy, I'm so swamped. And at a certain point, that response just became annoying because it comes across as self-importance at a certain point. And I think as women, we like to feel needed. We have this very deep psychological and subconscious need to feel needed. We like to do the nurturing and the caretaking and making ourselves feel needed because that kind of goes back to some of the survival pieces. If we are needed, we survive. If we're not needed, we don't survive. And again, these are just old subconscious beliefs built on millennia of our humanity. So being busy, even if we are the ones adding the unnecessary busyness to our business, growth can create that feeling of being needed. And let's be honest, isn't there a little bit of a high that comes from being busy? Like there is a little bit of a high. And I know for myself, there are certain things that give me dopamine hits and that feeling of being alive. And I think for a lot of women who are wired to want to be entrepreneurs, we naturally get highs from the creation process. And sometimes we never put limits or boundaries on that creation process. And just because we are highly creative doesn't mean that we don't need boundaries around it, that it should just leak out into everything. And the reality is, on top of the creative aspect of our business, we also have all the very pragmatic things that need to be done in our business as well. Because business is not pure creation, it's also not pure pragmatic, get it done, do the business logical numbers, closing deals, finance, accounting side of things either. I was raised by a baby boomer, and that's the generation that still remembers hard work. I was eight years old, and before I went to school, I had to make sure that all four horses were properly fed hay, bringing the hay from the greenhouse to the stables, and then making sure that the horses had fresh water, and sometimes in the winter, because the hoses were frozen, I actually had to carry big buckets of water from the house to the barn in order to make sure that the horses had watered. And by the time I was 15, I had my first job. I helped raise my youngest brother. So life kind of shaped me in a way where laziness was never an option. Doing nothing was never an option. And I think a lot of high-performing women were just conditioned to believe that resting equals laziness. A lot of us have that in us where you got up at the crack of dawn, you started working, you didn't just go to school and come home and play. You went to school, you came home, you did your homework, you helped out with the chores, you cooked, you cleaned, you helped with your siblings, you got a job. And so when we are older and we start these businesses, we think that we have to continue the hustle in order to be successful. Because this concept and this idea of constantly doing something and working, it got so ingrained to us that we now equate resting with laziness. But did you know that Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a day and we were still talking about the guy? So I can promise you that if you don't learn to schedule rest regularly and boundaries around your work time and your creative time, that your body will eventually demand it through illness or exhaustion that you can't recover from. And you might think that that's never gonna happen to me because you're so healthy now and you have the energy now. But I promise that if you don't learn how to contain some of what is put inside of you so that you can maximize that and make the most of that, and that's the thing, I'm not saying diminish it, I'm saying maximize it, then something will inevitably happen. It's inevitable. The body can only take so much, and if you're pushing from a place of fear, which is essentially what addiction to hustle is, is it's coming from a place of fear, it's coming from a belief that if I don't do this, I'm not gonna be successful, then eventually something will happen. And some women believe that if things feel calm, that something is wrong. And I 1000% know this feeling. I used to get anxiety if I had a day without any emails or questions or requests from clients, I would get anxiety because I thought, oh my gosh, something is wrong. And I think a lot of women can probably identify with that. A lot of women also just stay in constant motion because slowing down would force them to actually look at what's going on within themselves. And there are a lot of people who get addicted, men and women, who get addicted to building and creating and hustling so that they don't actually have to face things about themselves that they're really truly uncomfortable with, or maybe it's past pains and hurts from childhood or from the things that we all go through in life. You know, maybe we had a bad breakup, maybe we had a divorce, maybe we lost a parent or a loved one, or maybe we are a cancer survivor. There's things that happen in life if you live long enough that sometimes we don't want to deal with, and so we get addicted to just hustling and being really busy, and we can build an entire identity around this, and our society rewards this. Our society rewards you being busy and looking like you're actually doing something when all you're doing is creating chaos within your own nervous system. I want to challenge the idea that busyness means success because everybody knows that's listening to this podcast right now, that's a female, every single female has heard of Spanx. If you haven't, you've been living under a rock, quite literally. Now, what you guys might not know is that Spanx, which was created by Sarah Blakely, she built Spanx slowly and strategically without any outside investors for years. She started with $5,000, she kept her day job initially, and she focused predominantly and primarily on one product, and she simplified instead of overexpanding. She got so good at building the one product before she ever expanded the business, and she relied heavily on how she positioned herself and her business, as well as making sure her customers understood what the value was. Again, if you guys listen to my other podcast episodes, you will hear me belabor value and the importance of communicating the value to the customer. And that's exactly what Sarah Blakely did. She made sure her customers understood what the value was from her product, and then she became a billionaire without all of the venture capitalist chaos and culture that comes along with having venture capitalist investors. Now, VC is for some people, VC is not for everybody. But Sarah Blakely is a great example of a female who founded a business, built a product where there was a need and not a huge market saturation, but there were still other products out there for women like Spangs, but she built a product that is now the equivalent to Kleenex, it's the equivalent to Google, it is the equivalent to Q-tip. And what I mean is now women use Spangs almost to mean the under undergarment wear that women use for body shaping. And just the same way we talk about Q-tips as meaning the cotton swab, right? It's actually called a cotton swab. And spangs is actually women's undergarment body shape wear, but it has one word now, just like when we talk about we're gonna look something up online, we say, I'm going to Google this. It has become a verb. So I think Sarah Blakely is a great example of somebody who didn't rely on creating chaos and busyness just in order to create a highly successful company. And again, there's always varying degrees of success. Like you don't have to become a billionaire. Not everyone's path in business is to become a billionaire or a millionaire. Sometimes it's just to build something that can withstand the test of time and create legacy for them and their family. Another thing about Sarah Blakely is she's also talked openly about intuition, simplicity, resilience, and not trying to look impressive. She scaled through the things that I'm trying to teach you guys, which is clarity and focus. Focus your energy, contain your creative energy. The more that you can contain that energy, then you can channel that energy and you can actually create success easier because you've channeled it instead of scattered it. Some women who start businesses are now no longer building businesses anymore, they're just maintaining a constant state of emergency. Because who am I if I'm not putting out a million fires? Okay, why working harder stops working? Every business has bottlenecks, and a bottleneck is a point in your process where the business is slowed down by some internal or external system or process. And this is why you need to make sure that the right systems and processes are in place to move through these, and working harder does not remove a bottleneck, it just creates more tension. And if you visualize what a bottleneck actually is, it's when something gets a lot smaller, and if you just continue trying to put more through a part of your business that is leaning out, you're just gonna get tension, you're just gonna get backflow. It doesn't work. Businesses cannot scale past the capacity of a dysregulated founder. If every answer, approval, client issue, and task runs through you, you are the bottleneck. And businesses cannot scale past the capacity of a dysregulated founder. Burnout. I mentioned this before. If you keep going, eventually something will happen to your body because your body is finite. Well, the creativity that's within you might not be finite, your body is, and the more that you push, the more likely you are to burn out, which does happen, and when you burn out, that creative power, that creative source starts to diminish. That's why you often see people who are writers, lyricists, creators, developers, and when they burn out, they lose all of that creative juice. And it's not that the creative juice is gone, it's not that it no longer exists within them, it's just that they've pushed their body too far, which no longer allows some of that creative force to flow through in a way that your brain can actually output it because your brain and your body have said no more, we can't do anymore. And if that happens, when you are building your business, your ability to operate your business dramatically decreases. And I'm not talking a little bit, I'm talking a lot. And one of the most famous burnout cases is Ariana Huffington. Uh, she collapsed from exhaustion in 2007 after extreme overwork. She hit her head and broke her cheekbone. And that experience led her to completely rethink hustle culture and eventually she ended up building Thrive Global around burnout prevention. Her story became a major public example of how high achievers and severe burnout often coexist. I see a lot of male online content creators and coaches who push the idea of more, more, more, work harder, harder, harder, and they brag about working as much as they do. But women, I would encourage you not to listen to these male influencers for how you run building your business. Take their lessons and coaching around marketing, advertising, and whatever else that they offer and teach, but leave the overworking or you fail piece alone. And you may not believe this, but it is entirely possible to build a business without entirely burning yourself out. You just have to do it strategically because when you get to the place of burnout, when you get to the place of pushing yourself too much, you start making poor decisions. You start making decisions that cost you financially. You end up with emotional exhaustion, and now you become the boss that people hate. You lack creativity because that juice, it's like that creative power, it comes from an unseen source, it comes from something not intellectual. Creative force is something not logical, it's not rational, but it's juice, it's power, and it comes from the unseen. And when you get to the place of burnout, like I said, it's very hard for you to experience the flow of that creative power, and that's what you need to continue running your business and coming up with the multi-million dollar ideas, the ideas that are going to grow your business, the ideas that are going to captivate your customers and your ideal clients and give them the product or the service that they want and need that's going to continue to help to fund and grow your business. There's also something called the law of diminishing returns. The law of diminishing returns states that adding more of one input to a fixed amount of other inputs will eventually produce a smaller increase in output. So adding more of your time and energy when you have already put in the level of time and energy that your body that you actually have physically to give into so many other pieces of your business, it's not going to yield the same level of results. The other thing that also happens is in a business, when we try to do everything, we create something that causes dependency on us. And I have said this before, and I'm going to say it again, but if you build a business that cannot outgrow you, then you've just created a job for yourself, not a business. And sometimes with businesses centered around you as the brand, that can be a little tricky, but even with personal brands, you can still create a degree of outsourcing work, creation, editing, marketing, etc. that does not need you. And with personal brands, coaching, consulting, etc., the idea of creating a business looks like something that can mostly run itself. People can still buy products without you needing to be there for the transaction. So you have to, and I've said this before, think of your business as a child. It should not need you eventually in order to run. You should eventually be able to fully step away, whether it's a month long vacation or it's a six month sabbatical, or it's you. Completely stepping back, and now you've hired a CEO and now you're just on the board, or you're just a shareholder who just reaps the financial reward of a business that is growing and thriving. Oftentimes, when we think that we have to work harder, it's because we're compensating for poor systems. And I've talked to women business owners who tell me how busy they are, how many emails that they have unread or unanswered. And I'll ask a simple question of like, well, why don't you have an assistant who just goes through your emails for you and tells you what ones are the most important ones that you need to read to and attend to first, and maybe that assistant can help with some of those emails. And they'll say, No, I have to do it because nobody else can do a job like I can. And I'm gonna tell you that that's an incredibly lonely, hard road, and you have not created a business, you've just created a job for yourself. So entrepreneurs think in terms of building businesses. People who are employees think about creating a job for themselves. So what one are you? Are you a business owner or are you somebody who's an employee? Okay, so now I want to talk about your business and what it looks like is truly a representation of the systems that you have in place, or maybe you don't have any, and again, that's going to be represented in how your business looks. Now, I've already thrown up this idea that it's entirely possible to build a successful business without burning yourself out, and it is, but I've also said that you need to do it strategically. And so, what does being strategic look like? It means figuring out what are the most important things for your business to grow. Is it a really nice, flashy website? Probably not. Is it really good SEO? Possibly, if that's where your ideal customer or client is looking and searching. Is it a bunch of viral reels on TikTok or Instagram? Maybe. So it's being really thoughtful and conscientious about where what things, because here's here's the hard truth. There's probably a thousand things that you could do for your business, but only like one percent of those are actually going to be what really truly gives you the financial success and growth that you want to see in your business. And all the other 99 things that you can do are just extras. They're just going to create more of a brand, they're going to create more of an aesthetic appeal, maybe, but there's probably 1% of those thousand things that you could do for your business that will actually yield true results that equate to financial profitability for your business. And I want to emphasize the profitability piece because a lot of people, especially women, they will chase sales. And I mean, I see this all the time with online content creators and coaches where they talk about the sales numbers, but then it's like, well, what's your profit? Because if you're hustling harder just to create more sales and your profit continues to diminish, then what was the point of you working that much harder when your profit diminished? So, first thing, delegation. Delegating the things you don't enjoy doing, delegating the things that you are no longer good at doing and don't have the time to do, and that are way too costly for you to be doing. You doing administrative tasks, I get in the beginning of operating a business that a lot of times we're wearing many hats, and sometimes that includes doing the administrative stuff, doing the data entry, the bookkeeping stuff. Sometimes we do that in the beginning, but eventually it becomes very costly because think about what your hourly rate is, and then you think about what it costs to pay and admin. So if you do five hours a week of administrative work and your charge out rate is $200 an hour, well, that just costs you a thousand dollars. But if you had paid an administrative assistant $20 or $25 an hour, that would have only cost you $100 to $125 in that week. So delegating out the things that you're no longer good at, you no longer have the time to do, or you really just hate doing it because you are the face of your business and you can go out and you can get the sales, you can go out and you can get the customers and the clients, and that's more value than you doing the things that you're not good at, don't enjoy doing. Automation. Now, in our world of AI, people want to automate everything, but look, AI is great, but it's not great for everything. Just like a summer intern is great, but they're not great for everything. Somebody who's in the first year or second year of university of an engineering program is not a full-fledged engineer, and you sure as heck don't want them designing a bridge. They can do certain things, so automation is not just about automating every single process in order to remove the human aspect, but automation is about creating certain systems and processes that automate things that you have to do repetitively. If you're constantly sending the same emails, same answers, the same replies, if you're con if your onboarding process is fairly similar for every single customer or client you have. These are all things where you can create processes and systems, templates, training manuals in order to reduce the manual input that needs to be done time and time again. Boundaries, boundaries around your time, boundaries around what you're willing to give, boundaries around your energy, boundaries around your creative force. A lot of people think naively that if they just give and give and give and keep doing things, that that's better. But again, think about a water without a container, it goes everywhere. But if you have a container for that water, it's a lot more useful than if you just let the water go everywhere. If you just spill water everywhere, nobody can drink that water. There's not much you can do with it. But if you have a container of water, there's a lot of things you could do. You could drink it, you can wash your hands with it, you can wash dishes with it, you can cook with it, because it's contained. Just like your energy, just like your time, just like your resources. Okay, operational clarity. Operational clarity is what am I doing, who am I doing it for, and why am I doing it. When you know what are you doing, who are you doing it for, and why are you doing it, then you're not playing whack-a-mole in creating busyness and doing a million things for your business because you're going to do the things that are the most high yield, the most high value for your business and for the success of your business. You will be able to figure out the answers really, really quickly when you understand what your business is doing and where it's going. And that ties into prioritization. A lot of people have heard of the term eat the frog. Eat the frog means do the thing that you don't really want to do. Eat that first if it has the biggest impact. Often the things that have the biggest yield or the biggest impact are the things that we are the most afraid to do. But if you do those things first and then you prioritize all the other things after that, again, that's more traction. That's like turning the wheel one hard crank, as opposed to trying to turn the wheel really, really, really fast. It's like if you can turn that wheel one really hard, full crank, then that actually builds more momentum. And then the following turns of the wheel are a lot easier. You also, and I've said this before, focus on profitability. Again, don't get so busy chasing sales that you don't even know the rest of your number. So many people think only in terms of sales. And the number of businesses that I have seen over the years that are making seven figures or high high six figures, and they are continuing to operate at a financial loss, or the the owners of the company are barely paying themselves. I'm gonna tell you it's probably over 50% of businesses that I have seen over the years that operate like this when I first meet with them. So don't get so busy doing the things that you think you need to do, chasing sales, if you're not focused on your profit. You should know those other numbers. You should know what percent of your sales is going to advertising and marketing. And you should also know what return on the investment am I getting from this advertising and not just the advertising itself, but where am I advertising and what return on investment am I getting from each of those? How much does it cost for me to produce one dollar of sale? Is it 70 cents for every dollar of sale that it costs? Because if that's the case, then my margins are too low. I'm not charging enough. So you can keep chasing sales, but you're basically just like a car spinning its wheels in mud. You're not gonna get anywhere, you're just gonna keep spinning your wheels. So again, if you don't have tasks delegated, if you don't have repetitive things automated, if you don't have boundaries around your time, your energy, your resources, your creative output, if you don't know what you're doing, who you're doing it for, and why you're doing it, if you don't know what things you need to prioritize first, and if you don't focus more on profitability over your busyness and your sales, then that's going to show. It's gonna show up in you, it's going to show up in your relationships, it's going to show up in your health, it'll show up in your life, and it will also show up in your bottom line and how successful your business actually is. If your bottom line is very, very weak, but your sales are very, very high. I can guarantee that one of those things, or probably multiple of those things, is not properly put into place or needs improvement. Think of building a business as something that can be scalable. You want to be able to scale because when you scale, that's when you get larger, that's when you get more profit. I've talked about the formula for pricing before, but every business has its fixed costs, and you have your sale price of everything, and then you have your variable costs, and your variable costs are everything that it costs to make one unit that you sell. So whether that's time or whether it's a product. So variable costs are things like labor that goes into developing something, materials and supplies that goes into developing something, but you have your fixed costs, which are everything that keep everything that it costs to keep your business operational, open, and running. And that even if you have zero sales, you're still going to have to pay those things. You're gonna have to pay to keep the lights on, you're gonna have to pay to keep the doors open, you're gonna have to pay certain staff, and then you have staff that are really only dependent on if you have sales, and you have materials and supplies that are really only dependent if you have sales. So the margin between your sale price and your variable costs is your profit once that margin covers the fixed costs. So your fixed costs are covered by the margin between the sale price and your variable costs, and anything that you do above that now just becomes your profit. And you need to design a business that can be scaled so that that margin can turn into profit, and the more that you can sell above and beyond covering your fixed cost, that's just margin in your pocket. But that comes from having all of those things that I've talked about in place. All right, our fourth section is all about your nervous system, the chaos that we get when we create busyness. Depending on the beliefs that you have and how you grew up and the things that have transpired in your life, you will have a nervous system that is set to chaos for feeling safe and comfortable and like everything is well in the world, or you will have a nervous system that believes that peace and calmness and steadiness is safety. In today's world, even if you didn't have some traumatic childhood or chaotic upbringing, or parents who operated and functioned in chaos, I think suffice it to say that our world is very chaotic, and our world is creating constant dopamine hits and constant do more, be better, stronger, faster, throw things out the second they start wearing out or wearing down. And I think that that in and of itself is starting to create a lot of nervous system dysregulation in people where they're equating chaos, busyness, destruction, breaking down, replacing with being normal, with being safe, with just being the norm. So there is a degree of that that we also have to be conscientious about and almost reprogram ourselves for because we will naturally move towards whatever our nervous system is set for. Because again, going back to things I've said before, our nervous system is wired in such a way to work with our brain to keep us safe. The brain's job is to keep us safe and alive, and so our nervous system works with our brain, and those two work together to try to keep us safe and alive. Now, it's not happening on conscious level, it is happening on a subconscious level. So if your nervous system is wired for chaos and dregulation, then doing things in a steady, methodical, non-chaotic, non-busy way, that's gonna feel very, very foreign to you, and that's going to feel very weird, and you're going to feel like you're doing something wrong, and your brain will start to tell you this means you're not gonna be successful. Look at all those other people that are hustling and showing that they're hustling, and look at how much money they made. And here's the thing: they're only showing you their sales, they're not showing you that they don't have good tax planners in place with them so that they're not paying millions of dollars in taxes, they're not showing you that they're spending 40% of their sales on marketing and advertising so that their profit is barely there. They're not showing you these things. I have seen so many people because I get to see what's behind the scenes, I have seen so many people that either filed bankruptcy or were almost bankrupt themselves, or they can't even afford to pay themselves a salary, and their company is making seven figures, they are on podcasts that are well known, they are rubbing shoulders with venture capitalists and high-profile people, and their business is freaking broke, and they are out there making it look like they are incredibly successful. So don't equate what you see from other people as necessarily the truth of how it can be built, and it's entirely possible to build a business based on strategy and based on a more calm pace, and it doesn't mean that you're never gonna be stressed, it doesn't mean that you're gonna be all zen and that it's just gonna be calm, cool, and collected because that's not the reality. To live life means to also experience stress, it also means to experience pain and discomfort and things that we don't like, but there's a difference between just creating busyness by doing a lot of things that a lot of those things aren't yielding results, or operating it in a very operational strategic, grounded way that actually yields results that continue to grow and build and scale over time in a way that your nervous system can actually handle. When our nervous system is wired in a way that's not geared towards calmness and peace, we tend to feel guilt when we slow down. And here's the secret: you can rewire that, you can actually face the guilt, and you can acknowledge the guilt, and you can recognize that it's a lie, and that you don't need to feel guilt for slowing down. But that's a conscious choice on your part. There is a degree of you making a decision to operate and move differently. You have to choose what you are doing, who are you doing it for, and why are you doing it, and how, how do you want to do it? How do you want it to be? Do you want to be chaotic? Great, then this probably isn't even the episode for you if you want your business to be chaotic. But if you want to feel some degree of normalcy where you can withstand growing and building a business for decades, then you need to do it differently and you need to have a conscientious approach to it, and you need to make strategic decisions. When our nervous system is wired for stress, we tend to get overstimulated, and that overstimulation is eventually going to lead to chronic health issues, chronic fatigue, decline, disease, and we won't be able to do what we need to do for our business. So it doesn't help. It only hurts to have a nervous system that's wired in such a stressful way. I think some women think that they're addicted to success because they'll just think that they're addicted to the win or the close or the sale. And in reality, what they're addicted to is the adrenaline that comes from chasing. And often you'll see them that they're the chaser in all areas of their life. And that's not an addiction or a love for success, that's an addiction and love for the stress that comes with the adrenaline. So sometimes less is more. I've met with a lot of women who when I get to talking to them, you can feel and you can see how incredibly ungrounded they are. And when you present them with the idea of being more calm and thoughtful, they have so many excuses and reasons for why they can't. And they'll talk about all of the things that they have to do, and then maybe I can encourage them and challenge them on their thinking, and maybe by the end of the conversation, they will be in agreement with me because they will have seen the light, but then when they leave that meeting and they never implement it, and they go right back to the chaos and the busyness and stressed out and being in over their head, and then when you talk to them five years later, they're still in the exact same position. And it's like you have to choose differently, you have to want differently for yourself, and then you have to start believing it's entirely possible. But if you don't believe it's possible, if you don't truly want it for yourself, you're never going to change. And here's the thing: your busyness doesn't make you more important than anybody else. So if you believe that, I'm gonna challenge you to check that belief because your busyness does not make you more important than anybody else. Okay, so now we are in our last section, ladies, and this is where we're gonna just talk about how you can grow smarter in your business. I've given you a lot throughout this episode, but this is where we're just gonna break it down. Here's what you should do, here's what you can start implementing, here's what's realistic. Okay, first thing, and I've said this so many times, build strategically. If you don't know what building strategically means, it simply is imagine stepping back from your business. Imagine just stopping all the busyness just for a moment, long enough for you to step back and zoom out and look at your entire business and see everything and go, what's the most important thing? What feeds that, and what can I put aside? Because maybe it's not the most important thing. It might be important, doesn't mean it's not important, it's just not the most important thing. Building strategically is you're stacking one thing on top of the other once you have that first level mastered. Go back to Sarah Blakely. She started with one product and she got the market to understand what the value of that one product was, and she ended up becoming a billionaire without the venture capitalist investors and with very little investment herself. So build one brick on top of the other, one layer on top of the other. Simplify your offers. More is not more, less is more. Get so good at offering value through one channel, through one thing, through one niche, through one type of customer, through one type of client. It doesn't mean one customer or one client, because I have a whole rule on that that I'll share in another episode eventually. But get so good at providing so much value to your niche that you build a reputation around that, and then you've built trust with people. And once you build trust with people, they know you, they like you, they trust you, they want to buy from you, then you can start adding in other things. Streamline all of your systems. So everything that's in your business needs to talk to each other. I've worked in businesses before where every department is so separated from all of the other departments, yet you have one business. You have one business, so all of those systems should flow. All of those departments should flow smoothly and nicely. There should be a beginning and there should be an end. There should not be choppy systems. And so if your systems that are currently in place, and even if you have no systems, that's still a system. No system is a system. Chaos is a system. Dysfunction is a system. It's just dysfunction. It's just chaos. It's just broken. So the systems that you have in place need to talk to each other, need to communicate, need to be streamlined. The other thing I see a lot of business owners do is the hop on the bandwagon of whatever program or system seems shiny. And then the next thing you know, they have five different systems when they could probably have two or three of those because there's so much overlap with what some of those systems and programs actually do. That if they again zoom out from your business, pull back from your business and look at your entire business from beginning to end, from the beginning of the product or service lifecycle to the very end of it when you close with the customer and you part ways, what does that entire process look like? You have a chain and you look at what is needed every step of the way, what's going to make every step of the way better, and what systems are going to fit into that so that we don't have a hundred different things, or like many businesses that I've seen, a hundred different types of spreadsheets and a hundred different types of folders, and you could probably get it down to ten. So streamline those. Focus on your profit. Stop chasing sales. The reason people chase sales is because they don't know the rest of their numbers. And when they're chasing their sales and they don't know the rest of their numbers, that's when they put themselves in a position of becoming a million-dollar or a multi-million dollar company and they are still unprofitable, they're still operating a loss, they still can't afford to pay for employee improvement or process and system improvement. They can't increase their marketing and their advertising budget because all they've been doing is chasing sales and plugging holes instead of focusing on profit. So in order to focus on profit, you have to know all of your other numbers. Remove all of the unnecessary complexity and ambiguity out of your business. So if there's any part of your business model that's overly complex or it's ambiguous of what it does and what it's built for, then remove it. You don't need it. And I promise, I promise you don't need it. Because if it's overly complex or if it's ambiguous about what it's actually doing and how it's actually improving and yielding results for your company, then I promise that you don't need it. So simplify it. Also, stop overcomplicating marketing. A lot of people get really stumped and don't know what to do about marketing, so they start kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and they just do everything. They think they need to be on TikTok or Instagram or have a really nice website or do a bunch of SEO or they need to advertise in Yelp or they need to advertise in the yellow pages, or they need to invest in this marketing or that marketing, or they need to hire this marketing manager or this advertising agency or this PR person. And the truth is that you need to go back to your numbers. And I will say this one a million times: men lie, women lie, numbers do not lie. Your data does not lie as long as it's being tracked and recorded, your data does not lie. So pay attention to the data. Focus on marketing where your ideal customer or client is. Don't waste money and time and resources on marketing where your customer is not going to be. I mean, perfect example. Or why would you go to a barbecue festival to advertise your online marketing business? Now, maybe that could work, potentially, but probably not. Probably not. People are there because they want to eat bad food. If you are an online fitness coach, you need to market where people actually care about their health. Health food stores, smoothing and supplement stores, online forums where people are talking about their health, gyms, places where people actually are signaling that they want and need your services. You don't go where somebody isn't signaling that they want and need your services. Now, yes, you might find customers there. In actuality, you will find customers there, but how many? Right? Again, you're going for yield and you're not trying to do everything. Measure your return on investment on everything. Everything. You hire an employee. What's the return on investment? Now, people, human capital always comes with intrinsic value. So sometimes it's not just, oh, Betty or Susie or Mark or Paul aren't, you know, they're in the accounting department, so I don't really see any sales coming from them. They have no value, there's no return on investment. Well, there very much is because you need your numbers. You know, a lot of companies will actually think that their marketing and advertising team are the most important, and they'll forget about everything else because there's not an actual dollar value that you can equate to those other systems. But again, go back to what I said earlier. If you need to be able to define what those systems do for your business, and accounting, finance, they also play a role. Your HR also plays a role in your business, again, depending on what size of your business you have. But everything in your business should have a return on investment. Don't be afraid to scrap certain business ideas. If all of a sudden you realize that something isn't profitable, it's feedback, it's data. So if you come up with a great new marketing idea and six months down the road, I would probably say in three to four months down the road, depending on what the marketing advertising idea is and what the life cycle is meant to be for that, scrap it. It's not working. If it's not working, scrap it. Don't be afraid, don't let it bruise your ego. You tried something, that's what business is about. Business is not about getting it right every single time. If you're attached to the idea of worth and value coming from you getting things right, you're gonna be disappointed being a business owner. You need to get really, really comfortable with being wrong, probably 99% of the time. So don't be afraid to evaluate the return on what you're doing in your business and just scrap things if it doesn't work. Last piece of advice is protect your energy. And I've said that before: protect your energy, protect your creative energy, protect your time, protect your resources, protect what customers and clients that you choose to give your time and energy to because some of them aren't worth it, and that's not a dig on them, it's just you are growing a business. Your business is your child. What does your child need to thrive and succeed and grow? Okay, a few final points that I just want to talk about is if you have employees standardized your onboarding with all of the technology that we now have available. I mean, 75% could probably be completed without human hand holding in most cases. And if you hire the right people and you train them using standardized processes that work, then you or someone else can train them on the other 25%. Automate your repetitive administrative work. Admin work is probably your most inexpensive labor to outsource. And if you try to do it yourself, it becomes the most costly. Outsource and automate as much admin work as you can and hire a right-hand person, hire a virtual assistant, create automatic replies and set up response, purchasing and booking systems. Last couple of points here: stop creating content that doesn't convert. Again, go back to your ROI. Measure what actually generates your revenue. Protect your focus and stop saying yes to everything. Also build systems before adding more workload. If you start adding more workload before you build the right systems and processes, you'll never do it. I promise you can tell yourself that you will do it. I can promise you will not do it. Because I've seen it time and time again where businesses start to scale before they have the right processes and systems in place. Now, if you're in sales, you just need to focus on getting the sale. But if you are actually selling a service or a product, there's some degree of system building that you need to do so that as you scale, you can handle it. The workload can be handled without fracturing and breaking your business. Your business was created by you to support your life, it should not consume it. And I'm gonna say this again: being overly busy doesn't make you more important than anyone else. And chaos isn't proof that you are ambitious. So I want you to think about this. I want you to think about creating a healthy business built on clarity, operational clarity, clarity of intent, clarity of purpose, clarity of who you are serving, why you are serving them, how you are serving them, and what you are serving them. Systems, leadership, and sustainability. Okay, so you ladies don't need to destroy yourselves in order to grow. I promise you don't. I want you to think about doing business in a new way. I want you to think about doing business in a way that is sustainable for decades. You are running a marathon, not a sprint. So I hope that was really helpful to you guys. I am wishing you continued success in your businesses. Feel free, as always, to send me your questions and suggestions for episodes to the overcomeherpodcast at gmail.com. Again, it's the overcomeherpodcast at gmail.com. And I am your host, Samantha Noel, and you have just been listening to the Overcome Her Podcast. Also, join me on my Facebook group where we talk about topics all female entrepreneur related at BuiltforProfit. Again, that's the Facebook group, Built for Profit. I'm also on Instagram, would love to connect with you guys, and we will see you on the other side.